Lise McClendon may be one of those authors who have benefited from the expansion of regionalism within the mystery genre. She came into print in 1994 with her first book about art gallery owner Alix Thorssen. While an amateur detective with an interesting occupation is not unusual, what was different was that the protagonist’s gallery is in Jackson, Wyoming. While the West had been a useable territory since the pioneering works of Tony Hillerman, the association of art and murder do not necessarily lend themselves to thinking about the wide open spaces of the West.
But to her credit, McClendon does a fine job of integrating all three elements into a series. When asked how all this came to be, McClendon said, “I came to write my first mystery novel after writing a first novel (thankfully still in a drawer) that had some suspense elements in it. I had actually written parts of "The Bluejay Shaman" as a straight novel, with elements of real life from a Salish Indian friend, when I decided to work it over into a mystery. I enjoy writing mysteries for the same reason we all enjoy reading them, the tension, the suspense, the unfolding of clues. I felt a bit clueless when I first starting writing novels, especially as to plotting, and mysteries helped me through.”
The elements of amateur detective and art may make some readers leap to the incorrect conclusion that this series would be identified as a cozy. However, the voice that McClendon has chosen for Alix Thorssen is nearly hardboiled, and this series stands clearly within the traditional style with elements of the hardboiled layered in. “Interesting you think of Alix's voice as hardboiled. I do too!” says McClendon. “I modeled her and the books more after the female private investigator like Kinsey Millhone or V.I. Warshawski than the small-town cozy sleuth you might expect because Jackson Hole is a small town. I chose first person for the same reasons, to connect immediately with readers through voice, to show the internal conflicts of the character. I didn't intentionally make her hardboiled. Rather I wrote the book like books I like to read. I'm a big fan of Marcia Muller too; more than anyone I followed Muller's lead. Interestingly, Muller wrote a short mystery series featuring an art expert as well.”
In The Blue Jay Shaman (Walker, 1994), readers are introduced to Alix. Although her gallery is in Jackson, Wyoming, the action of book one takes place in Missoula, Montana. This is the town where Alix’s sister Melinda lives, and Melinda’s husband, anthropology professor Wade Fraser, has been arrested for the murder of Doris “Shiloh” Merkin. Shiloh is one of many characters in this book who are drawn to the Native American culture for spiritual guidance, and in some case, profit. Alix is in Missoula to help the local police identify a cache of art that may be stolen or fakes, but her concentration on that task is limited as she tries to identify the murderer and free her brother-in-law. Besides Native American issues, other subjects covered in this first book are university politics, sibling relationships, and women’s issues. What is most impressive about this debut novel is the time McClendon spends showing the effect of the crimes on the people involved. This effect takes its toll on Alix as well, and the first person narration is dark and driven, giving it the harder edge then one might expect when reading about an art gallery owner.
Alix Thorssen’s adventures continued in Painted Truth (Walker, 1995) in which a Jackson Hole gallery is burnt down by arson and a local artist is found dead in the charred remains. In Nordic Nights (Walker, 1999), Alix defends her stepfather Hank from a murder charge when he refuses to say why he was found with the body of a visiting Norwegian artist. And this June, readers will be able to visit with Alix one more time when Walker publishes Blue Wolf.
For her new book, One O’Clock Jump (St. Martins Minotaur, $23.95, 0-312-25195-5, 03/01. Private Investigator) McClendon has chosen to take advantage of another major trend in mysteries, the historical. This historical is set in the post-Pendergast period of Kansas City, a top reeling from the effects of the Depression and the lack of control exhibited when social systems collapse, even if they were corrupt systems. Pendergast, the city’s boss, has just gone to jail, and the city is in turmoil as others interested in the same graft and corruption fill the void he left.
“I selected 1939 Kansas City through a series of leaps of writerly logic. I wrote a book, a suspense novel (unsold), set in Helena, Montana, near the Missouri River. I had though of writing a series of novels set on the
Missouri with no other thematic connection. Since I lived in Kansas City for a couple years, it seemed like a natural to set a book there. But contemporary Kansas City as a setting doesn't interest me much. Sixty or seventy years ago though Kansas City was hopping with corruption, crime, music, gambling -- lots of crime writing fodder. Then I had a vision, of a girl floating face down in the Missouri in a pale blue dress. From there, ‘One O'clock Jump,’ which was Count Basie's theme song, and also written in 1939.”
Amos Haddam, an Englishman with damaged lungs from mustard gas received in the trenches during WWI and an unrequited ache for the love he lost at the same time, is trying to maintain the Sugar Moon Investigations agency with just one remaining op: Dorie Lennox. Amos’s cases come from Dutch Vanvleet, a Pendergast-era survivor who tosses cases to Haddam despite the man’s age and illness. And, now by circumstance, a man dependent on an inexperienced female operative.
“So when I came to write a ‘real’ female private eye, I wanted a new voice, something reflective of the time period in the Depression-to-World War II era. Also someone who reflected a different world-view but it comes out as a different literary point-of-view, too. I love third person, being able to switch into different character's heads, create suspense, multi-layer. Third person is more ambitious, if done right, and more satisfying,” says McClendon.
Dorie grew up in Atchison, Kansas. Dorie’s father left her family when she was a child, and her mother descended into alcoholism for relief. Circumstances that are hinted at throughout the book indicate that Dorie stole a car at the age of 14 so that she could drive her friend Arlette to Kansas City to get an abortion. When caught, she was sent to Beloit Girl’s School. While she was in Beloit, her mother died in a car accident caused by her alcoholism, and Dorie’s baby sister Tillie died as well. Dorie is psychologically damaged by this past and her multiple defense mechanism she develops to relieve her guilt leaves her remote and morose.
After being released from the girl’s home, she lived with her uncle Herb Warren, a captain in the Kansas City Police. A brief period of positive growth finds her a sprinting champion in high school and that got her a college scholarship. But it is all taken away when Dorie injured her right knee doing track and lost her scholarship.
All of this early trauma has left her damaged but also made her tough as nails, and she is able to handle the pressures of investigative work for Haddam. When she is given the job of tailing Iris Jackson by an unscrupulous lawyer and his mobbed-up client who claims Jackson is his girlfriend, she is on the spot when Jackson commits suicide off of one of the city’s bridges late one night. Oddly, her client now wants her to continue to probe into the dead woman's life. As she does, she begins to suspect that her tail job was a phony, and so was the woman she was tailing. When Haddam goes into an emotional tailspin when accused of murder, she is left isolated in an environment not friendly to female investigators.
McClendon explains, “So I created Dorie Lennox, a hard luck girl from Kansas who wanted nothing more in early years than to pilot planes like Amelia Earhart, but is left to deal with reality like the rest of us, down here on the earth. With third person though, we also get to see into the mind of Amos Haddam, an ex-pat Brit who is Dorie's boss. Through Amos we perceive the war in Europe, feel the foreboding and doom of oncoming conflict. Amos's point of view is important in the first few books (the second, "Sweet and Lowdown," is set in 1940) before the U.S. actually joins the war.”
The echoes of past occurrences reverberate throughout the work, with each major character damaged in some way by the past. The plot moves within the well-developed sense of both the historical and almost hysterical atmosphere of a dark, corrupt city teetering on the edge of control. Eventually, none of the characters can hide from the past and Dorie manages to achieve some level of success in explaining the two murders and resolving the mystery. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys noir, historicals, and tough female private eyes.
“Alix and Dorie are very different characters in my mind. Alix is more like me, had a more middle class upbringing. She is of course braver, more independent, kinder, and has a much more exciting life than me. She has a sort of romantic melancholy about life that often clings to me, I call it ‘Celtic melancholy,’ even though she is Norwegian. (The Scots are nothing more than shipwrecked Vikings, you know.)”
“Dorie Lennox is a much tougher character, with a fierce independence and a simmering anger about the turns her life has taken. She went to reform school for helping her best friend, that says a lot about her. She can be a smart-aleck, which is de rigeur for private eyes, isn't it? She is private and has visions of her baby sister who died while she was in reform school. Her father abandoned the family and her mother was a floozy. She struggles with loneliness and connecting to people like the folks in her boarding house, and men who want to love her. She and Amos both share survivor's guilt, in different ways.”
“Both Alix and Dorie lost their fathers early in life, and this made them tougher and more independent. But their world views, formed by their pasts, is very different. Alix just tries to enjoy life, to have a successful business, to bring beauty into the world. And then she keeps stumbling over dead people! Dorie Lennox is not entirely happy with being a private eye, although she does love a good car chase. She wants adventure, and flying, and independence, all the things men want, but in a man's world she will have to try harder.”
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